Quote

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

Grace Paley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Grace Paley
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 11
Died: 2007
Died: August 21
Activist
Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Wave
Land
Reversible
Waves
Beach

More quotes by Grace Paley

Image
I didn't intend. The word intend is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word intend is wrong. The word pressure is right. It's like any art form.
Grace Paley
Image
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
Grace Paley
Image
You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
Grace Paley
Image
Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
Grace Paley
Image
My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
Grace Paley
Image
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Grace Paley
Image
I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Grace Paley
Image
People will sometimes say, Why don't you write more politics? And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
Grace Paley
Image
Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Grace Paley
Image
A joke is necessary at this time.
Grace Paley
Image
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
Grace Paley
Image
If you want to do things, do things.
Grace Paley
Image
Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
Grace Paley
Image
Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
Grace Paley
Image
As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.
Grace Paley
Image
Art's too long and life's too short.
Grace Paley
Image
What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.
Grace Paley
Image
When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
Grace Paley
Image
My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
Grace Paley
Image
My mother went to demonstrations. I remember her going to a big demonstration for Earl Brower and she came home crying and said the Communists were very mean and booed their people. I remember feeling sad at her feeling sad.
Grace Paley